The technology in Men in Black looks like something a ten-year-old boy would doodle in the margins of his school book. The weapons have a slick space-age design with their lights and stainless steel color (and was it just us or did Jay's big gun have a creature living inside of it?). The gadget room has everything from a universal translator to a bouncy ball with enough oomph to cause the New York City blackout of 1977.

The film uses this technology to strengthen the theme that not everything is as it seems. Like the Noisy Cricket: the gun looks like something you'd get in a box of Froot Loops, and Jay complains that he's going to break the thing just by handling it.

But when he sees the Edgar Bug and takes his shot, the Noisy Cricket lets out a fiery explosion more like a mortar than a bullet. The recoil from the blast launches Jay back several feet; it's got the kind of kick you'd expect from a rocket launcher, not a tiny hand-held pistol.

Then there's the car. It looks like a typical 1987 Ford LTD Crown Victoria and even has an 8-track in the deck, which is outdated even by 1987 standards. Compact cassettes were totally in style by then; maybe Kay just didn't want to shell out for another copy of Promised Land.

Of course, it turns out to be anything but a typical car. Hit the little red button and it transforms into a space age vehicle with enough thrust to drive upside-down through the Queens-Midtown tunnel. It even has rocket engines in the trunk. We won't lie: Our inner ten-year-old squealed with joy when we first saw that.

In both cases, the technology houses something unexpected, and this imagery thematically extends beyond the tech. A pug is really an extraterrestrial, an observation tower is really a UFO, and a jewel is really an entire galaxy. Bottom line? The truth is way, way stranger than what we imagine.